An ephemeral pink gaseous cloud. Stars being formed. Fire. Water. Foliage growing. Dinosaurs.
On hearing the buzz around Terrence Malick’s latest film, Tree of Life, I feared it would come off like Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which tried to take on huge transhistorical themes, and which had some pretty cinematography, but ended up biting off more than it could chew. I was relieved to find that The Tree of Life avoids this, largely by avoiding traditional narrative.
Solar wind. Lush forests. A Dad playing with his children. Suburban America. A swing. Red hair.
The fragmented narrative we do get revolves around a traditional ’50s American family, A dad (Brad Pitt), a mom (Jessica Chastain), and three yonug boys (Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan). We learn early on that one of the boys has died, although we don’t know how, when, or why. After this, we get what seems like a year, maybe less, in the life of this family, which features a stern but loving father and head of household (known only as Mr. O’Brien) and the effects his emotional distance and harsh discipline have on the family. Kind of.
Dad coming home and scrutinizing the job eldest son has done tending the lawn. Dad saying Grace before dinner. Dad squirting kids with a hose. Mom sitting on the porch.
Women are an afterthought in this film, more a part of mise-en-scene than actual characters. The voiceover, however, which frames the film during the cosmic interludes, is that of the wife, suggesting an organizing presence if not a strong influence in family affairs.
Pleas to god. A small attic room. A doorway in the middle of a rocky landscape. A desolate beach out of time where the dead and mingle. The son grown up (played by Sean Penn) as an architect.
Religion plays a large role in this film. The patriarchal system of Malick’s ’50s goes God–>Father–>Son. The father says grace before every meal. The mother asks in voiceover “What are we to you?” as we see the creation of the universe and evolution of life over millenia. The answer, it seems, is that we are an infinitesimal part of an immense universe.
Malick manages to situate this family drama in the context of all of (what I will call for lack of a better term) creation but simultaneously to convey a melancholic urgency to this tiny story. He makes us feel small but makes us care about this family.
This film is difficult. I saw it a week ago and have since let it settle into place. Good films teach the viewer how to watch them early on, and this succeeded in training me to sit back and not to try too hard to make sense of it right away, but to let it wash over me. It is absolutely gorgeous, from the grandiose computer-generated cosmic sequences to the shots of everyday ’50s suburbia, but it is impossible to follow. There is little dialogue, and many scenes are probably less than two minutes, with shots lasting no longer than 5-10 seconds. There is no discernible chronology. All I’ve been able to do over the last week is gather impressions, which, I think, is the point. Malick is mimicking memory in all its fragmentation. We don’t remember in strict chronology, but impose narrative on disparate memories. Nothing makes sense as it is happening. Rather, we impose sense after the fact, through memory or religion or a rigid value-system.
One of the issues that this film foregrounds is the role of fatherhood. In my opinion, the father in this film is overbearing and overly strict, as evidenced by the hatred his son begins to feel for him. This interpretation is easily contradicted, however, by the numerous examples of affectionate interactions between father and son(s), and his semi-apology to the eldest son late in the film for being so hard on him at times. Pitt’s character is complex and complicated, and I think he acts as Rorschach test for what are commonly seen as largely generational differences in the interplay between child-rearing, masculinity, religion and tradition. This ambiguity is a testament to Malick’s realistic portrayal of this period, and his ability to (re)create without judgment. He leaves that up to the viewer.
Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris, is the fanciful tale of a writer, Gil Prender (Owen Wilson) who is about to get married, but falls in love with the city of Paris and contemplates moving there. Every night at midnight, a car picks Gil up and brings him to his favorite era, 1920s Paris, where he meets people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and, in a particularly funny scene, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Man Ray. Meanwhile, his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) is falling for her former professor, Paul (Michael Sheen).
This is Allen’s best film in quite awhile, certainly since Vicky Christina Barcelona, which this rivals. The fanciful aspects of the film blend nicely with the realistic, present-day sequences. The transition between them is smooth and Allen doesn’t burden us with lengthy explanations. They just happen, and we accept them. Of course, this is not the first time he has delved into the supernatural (think Sleeper, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Scoop or Deconstructing Harry), but it may be his best.
This is a film about regret and nostalgia from a director who specializes in, and in some ways embodies, such things. Gil regrets not moving to Paris when he was younger, and is trying to leave a career as a Hollywood writer to become a novelist. It quickly becomes apparent that he is in a mismatched relationship, and you wonder for a minute whether he is about to make another mistake that he will regret in getting married to a woman who doesn’t respect him, and whose parents do not like him. This dynamic is set up early in the film at a dinner where Gil argues with Inez’s dad about politics, and it is obvious they do not like each other. It is not difficult to notice the autobiography in many of Allen’s films, so it makes sense that, at 75, he has turned to thinking about the past. That said, the film is not at all depressing or brooding, but funny, light-hearted and optimistic.
The performances are uneven, but there are some sparkling moments. Owen Wilson does a pretty good job as the latest in a line of Woody Allen surrogates (most recently Larry David, but also Michael Caine, John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh, and others). He masters Allen’s nervous mannerisms in some of the present-day scenes but manages to play the fantastic parts of the movie straight, grounding and balancing the character with the laconic persona expected of Owen Wilson. Rachel McAdams also does a fine job in her role of belittling Gil and flirting with Paul, but most of her performance is bodily, walking around in a towel, jutting her hips, basically being seen. This is not her fault, of course, as Woody’s camera is a the perfect embodiment of the male gaze, and the Inez character is barely developed. A good case in point is the long take of Inez and her mother walking down the street, shot entirely in medium close-up of her ass swaying back and forth in tight jeans. Some of the best performances come in the fantasy sequences. Corey Stoll’s Hemingway is stereotypical and funny, as he constantly searches for fights and women, and never misses a chance to talk about bravery. Although he appears only in two short scenes, Adrien Brody chews it up as Dali, going on about rhinoceroses. Kathy Bates does a decent Gertrude Stein, and Marion Cotillard is a nice counterpart to Owen Wilson as his 1920s love interest.
One last thing about one of themes of the film. The character of Paul, played by Michael Sheen, takes up one of Allen’s ongoing themes: the arrogant intellectual. The most famous example of this is the guy in line at the cinema in Annie Hall.
In this case, though, Paul is a major character and a threat to the main relationship in the movie. He wears a perfectly trimmed, close-cropped beard, and starts every sentence with “If I’m not mistaken…” He is constantly in lecture-mode, even when he is occasionally wrong. He argues with a tour guide (played by Carla Bruni) about Rodin, and abets Inez in belittling Gil. He is a perfect incarnation of the insufferable academic, and a thoroughly unlikeable character. The opposition between Paul and Gil, the academic and the artist, is something Allen has been playing out for decades. Allen reveres thinkers, philosophers and writers but seems to revile academics. He is not so much anti-intellectual and anti-intellectuals. His critique may be fair in some cases, but it smacks of an underlying bitterness and oversimplifies the academic role. Or maybe I am being overly defensive. In any case, this is one of the most explicit portrayals to date of this ongoing tension in Allen’s work between critic and artist, a critique that may be fair in some cases, but could use a little nuance. Given the backdrop of the playful interplay of past and present, though, and the relative unimportance of these characters, it doesn’t detract from the fantasy elements of the film, which are, after all, the main attraction.
I have been hearing a lot lately about school districts and colleges supplying students and teachers with iPads, which strikes me both as potentially cool, but also limiting. What bothers me is that the story is always about iPads, not other tablets or systems. I am not a reflexive Apple hater, but I am critical of some of their practices, and I wonder what we are teaching when we teach only with devices that feature iOS as the operating system, as opposed to something like Android. This issue merits a longer post, and I will likely return to it later. This post is more about my move from iOS to Android, and some of the features that Android offers that are impossible in iOS. For a little balance, check out Audrey Watters’s discussion of the intuitiveness of iOS and Android tablets.
A little over a month ago, I moved from an iOS device (iPhone 3G) to an Android device (HTC Thunderbolt). The move was in no small part philosophical: Android is open source and developers are allowed to do more with the system than iOS developers. It is true that some carriers and hardware manufacturers set limits on customization, but in theory, anything is possible with Android. Here are some of the major differences, along with some apps to consider.
Home screen customization
In iOS devices (iPhone, iPad), the homescreens have grids of icons. That’s it. Apple added backgrounds and folders a few updates ago, but otherwise, the homsecreen is locked down. In Android, you can have widgets with time and weather, or twitter feeds, or basically whatever you want on the homescreens.
Messaging customization
With Apple, the text message and email programs they give you is what you get. With Android, you can replace the text messaging program if you don’t like the stock app. The two best programs I have seen are GoSMSPro and Handcent. They are both feature-rich and have themes. You can customize them to pop up on the homescreen, which can be set on a per-contact basis if you like, and they are prettier and more functional than stock. I lean heavily toward GoSMSPro mainly because if feels easier to customize. Handcent has a LOT of options.
Google Voice
If you use Google Voice, the level of integration is really nice. In addition to the GV app, try Voice Plus, which lets you set certain contact groups to automatically use your main number or GV number.
Browser options
With the iPhone, all I had for the longest time was Safari, and then, finally, Opera. On Android I can run Firefox 4, complete with add-ons, or any of a number of other browsers. Also, I can view full Flash sites, which Apple will not allow.
Keyboard Options
Instead of staying stuck with the same keyboard, Android offers many. My favorite by far is FlexT9, which allows you to slide your finger across the keys instead of tapping, greatly increasing speed. It also offers voice recognition and other features. Another great replacement is Swiftkey, which analyzes former text messages for syntax, and predicts the next word you are likely to need. The prediction is uncannily accurate. If it offered swiping as well, I would stick with it.
Appstore options
With iOS, everything goes through the appstore. With Android, the marketplace is the main place, but there are competing appstores, such as through Amazon. A cool feature I found accidentally is that I can find apps in the marketplace in my web browser on my PC, click install, and when I look at my phone, the app is installing. Pretty sweet.
Music options
With Apple, you are stuck with the iPod interface on the device and iTunes on the main computer. With Android you can use Songbird or Winamp or Doubletwist or the stock music player on both the device and the PC. Complete freedom here.
Summary
All in all, my Android experience for the first month has been overwhelmingly positive. I love the freedom and openness of this system. The laisser-faire attitude of the marketplace may result in increased potential for a virus or worm, but I’d rather take the chance (and install a free virus scanner like Lookout), than live in the shadow of Apple’s restrictions. Many like the simplicity and elegance of the Apple experience, and they are always at the forefront in hardware design, but the single appstore, along with the software restrictions, make it less than ideal for anyone who wants to take advantage of the full capabilities of the hardware. I take the argument of security with iOS the same way I look at standing in line and taking my shoes off at the airport. It might make people feel more secure, but it limits what I can do, and, in the end, it probably isn’t all that effective. My goal here is not to bash Apple — I liked my 3G and still use it as an iPod, and if anyone has just bought an iPad2 and wants to give the old iPad, I’d be happy to take it — but to point out the limitations of the software and point to a similar OS that allows much more. Later, I may look at some of the implications these limitations have for education.
The recent attempts by conservative groups to use open access laws like FOIA to do blanket searches for emails of professors they deem liberal is a bald attempt to intimidate academics, whom many conservatives see as liberal and therefore enemies. This practice came to light most recently after William Cronon brought to light the actions of the policy group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), after which the Republican Party started requesting emails with certain terms, such as “union,” “Walker,” “Republican,” and others, in them. Subsequently, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative group in Michigan, has also asked for emails of professors in labor departments at the University of Michigan, Michigan State Universtiy and Wayne State University (here’s their rationale).
The question that arises from this is: to whom are public university researchers responsible? The public? What does that mean? The electorate? Professors are not elected officials. The students? A large part of a professor’s job is teaching, but research is equally important, and, although the two are not always as easily distinguishable as some would like, much research has nothing to do with students or time in the classroom. The letters from UW counsel and the Chancellor Biddy Martin explain well the balance between the private and public in academia.
If you made a FOIA request of my wayne.edu email, I don’t know what you would find. There are ten years of emails in there, some personal, some not. I imagine there are probably emails in there about politics, but not for the last several years, because I, like many, use a personal email account for such matters and reserve my college email accounts for university business. How far, though, does Freedom of Information reach? If I send emails from my private account, but from a university-owned computer or IP address, might that be subject to exposure? How much does the public have a right to know?
In the era of sting politics, these groups seek to make public everything academics do, in hopes of turning up something incriminating or embarrassing. I would not be surprised to see, in the near future, covertly recorded video of classroom interactions, from planted students, in an effort to embarrass colleges and spread fear among instructors. When that happens, I would hope that administrations would back the instructors and not do what NPR did with Ron Schiller and the Obama administration did with Shirley Sherrod, firing people for damage control before investigating the facts.
In the end, faculty and administration responses to scare and smear tactics like these will decide the fate of academic freedom in public universities.
In this day, privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Employees are expected to have no private life, and if an employer discovers one, he reserves the right to fire the employee. Incidents of disciplinary action from social media and other online activity abound. Schools discipline students for posting pictures of drinking on facebook. People get fired for doing things outside of work. Potential employers do searches on applicants to see if they fit. These things are now commonplace. (There’s even a name for being fired for something online: being dooced)
The common advice to remedy this is to be careful about what you post online, which, on the face of it, seems like sound advice. If you don’t post embarrassing or incriminating material, nobody will be able to hold it against you. Guard your privacy, and create a sharp division between your personal and public, online, lives. I am not unsympathetic to this advice, and I do believe we should be aware of our potential audience(s) when posting online, but this approach can lead to paranoia, isolation and silence. The problem is that we have no control over the audience. A photo posted for friends suddenly becomes available to school or work authorities, or worse.
In addition to some improved media literacy awareness, we need to begin to realize that there really is no longer a way to delineate a clear line between what used to be private, personal interactions, and what has become the public arena of social media. Even if you are careful about what you post online, you has no control over what others do. Friends can post incriminating photos, or tag you on Foursquare or Facebook without your knowledge or consent. Or, in the case of PWSNT, you can be outed as a racist.
The blurring of this line takes place not only online, but in everyday life, as evidenced by the NPR video sting and other incidents. The NPR sting is an example of someone spouting personal opinions in a public arena, and being disciplined for it. In this case, Ron Shiller was acting as a representative of NPR, and, although he said he was “taking off his NPR hat,” he got into a lot of trouble for his remarks, ultimately losing his job (here’s a good response to the mess from HuffPo). We are increasingly facing a media environment where we can’t ever take off our professional hats, where personal opinion melds with professional position. I suspect, though, that if he had made these remarks not in a meeting as an NPR representative, but in an unguarded private moment that got caught on tape, the consequences may have been the same.
So, in a mediascape where every personal opinion is taken as part and parcel of a professional identity, is the solution simply to shut up? Should we never express personal or political opinions (no politics or religion in polite company)? No. I think we should fight to reclaim our personal identities and realize that every individual, no matter what official position he or she holds, also has a personal life, and that these roles may or may not always mesh, and that one does not necessarily determine the other. We should be able to take off our hats and put others on, and we should respect it when others do so.
In short, we need to be more forgiving. We need to assert that we often have personal lives that have nothing to do with our jobs, and, although we currently have no official recourse for disicplinary action based on social media, we should begin to rethink the power we give employers in the first place. I often hear people side with the employer in cases where people are fired for extracurricular activities (”they shouldn’t have done that/posted that, etc.), but the more appropriate response should be “The employer should not have so much power, or should mind his/her own business (literally).” Shame on the employer for digging into the personal lives of its employees. Shame on the employer for being nosy. Shame on the employer for not realizing that the worker’s life does not revolve solely around the work s/he does. Have you no decency?
What can we expect from students and what can they expect from us? This is a broad question that I would like to narrow down to technology.
What they (can) expect. When I started teaching at the college level, email was still somewhat new, and many people had mobile phones, but texting was not an option. Computers were not as ubiquitous as they now seem to be. If a student wanted to talk to me, she did so after class, or during my office hours. Occasionally I would get a phone call during office hours, or a message to call someone back. In the main, out-of-class inquiries were sequestered to these times and places. Also, all assignments were turned in on paper. As email caught on and students started using it, I found that their expectations for me began to change. They wanted sometimes unrealistically prompt responses, and expected me to available 24/7. I began to implement a system where I designated specific times when I promised I would check and respond to email — say, Friday morning and Tuesday afternoon. They may get a quicker response, I would tell them, but they could expect one no later than those times. Now, I try to respond as quickly as possible, and this semester I gave them a personal phone number — my Google Voice number — where they can call or text me with questions. So far, it has worked out pretty well.
What we (might) expect. As email evolved and Blackboard spread across campuses, opportunities for out-of-class communication expanded. Personally, I like using Moodle or BB, blogs, social networking tools and other asynchronous technology to enhance teaching, but lately I am plagued with question of access. I have had the opportunity to teach at many schools, either university, art college or community college, and have found that expectations for students’ access to the web varies widely. At some places, they live and breathe Blackboard. At others, some do not know how to check their email. A lot of this seems to be tied to socioeconomic status, but I contend that a lot has to do with how the college treats the students. All of the colleges that have employed me have provided students some sort of on-campus access to web-connected computers. At some campuses, students are expected to check email and Blackboard on a regular basis. At others, I have been told not to put anything online that is not also available in class, which severely limits my ability to do innovative stuff outside of class. No blogs, no social networking, no microblogging, no Moodle even. I feel like I have traveled backwards in time sometimes.
Back to the question. What should we be able to expect on the part of students in terms of access to technology? I assume mandating typed papers is ok, but should I expect that a student can email that paper? If the institution provides access, is it reasonable to expect students to be able, say, to maintain a weekly blog? Should they be able to expect me to post to Blackboard what they missed when they couldn’t come to class? Should I expect them to contact me to find that out? What are your experiences with students and technology?
Take mobile computing as an example. I found that when I moved from a dumb brick phone to a smartphone, I started organizing my time differently. I started using an electronic form of organizing exclusively for the first time. I started using Twitter more, and using it differently. I started answering emails more often, and I began to get more anxious if I felt I was in danger of being disconnected due to shoddy coverage. The experience has changed the way I interact with others in many ways, for better and worse. For example, I am often accused of being consumed by my phone, head down, always fidgeting to get it out of my pocket to google the simplest and silliest things. Now my contract on my iPhone 3G is up, and I am phone shopping.
I am leaning heavily toward an Android device, partly (maybe mostly) due to ideology, and partly for the convenience and versatility the OS and a carrier switch will provide. I have been playing with a Samsung Fascinate for the last week, and it feels much different than the iPhone. I wonder how carrying around a newer device on a different OS will change the way I interact with my environment. Will it be as profound as the switch from dumb phone to iPhone? Will it matter at all? I think it will.
On the other hand, I have been also considering going back to a simple dumb phone, and using only my laptop, or maybe eventually a tablet, for web browsing. I think maybe being less often connected might help me be more productive, slow down and a little, and save a lot of money. Is it really necessary for me to be this connected, this often? Is it worth it?
Back to ideology. I have long been a free software/open source advocate, but I wonder if I have been limiting myself by slavishly adhering to that ideology. One of the major reasons I want to move to Android is because it is open source. I use Linux in large part for ideological reasons, but I must admit there are a lot of drawbacks to sticking exclusively to Linux. It has been my experience that, just as I have found some quite superior and incredible open source programs, I have used many inferior or buggy products over the years only because they are open source, giving myself much headache and pain. For example, I composed my entire dissertation in OpenOffice, but found I had to move it to Word for formatting, especially of footnotes, which was a huge pain in the ass. Had I started in Word, in still would’ve been a pain, but maybe less so. I still like OpenOffice, but maybe it wasn’t/isn’t ready for large projects like that (and maybe the learning curve was too steep for me).
That said, I have decided to rethink my strict ideology. I have decided that I am finished with Apple for both philosophical and practical reasons, but other than that, I need to be more open about my choices. Rather than use proprietary software and feel guilty about it, I will reassess my current use in a more even manner, and make decisions based on what is best for me, always leaning toward FS/OS when convenient, but not making too many sacrifices to adhere to that. As far as current usage, I find myself booting into Win7, which came with my laptop, just as often as Ubuntu. In fact, I am composing this post in Scrivener for Windows Beta (proprietary, closed software) on Win7 (ditto), but I will edit and post it in WordPress (open source) on an Apache server (free software/GPL).
In a nutshell, in rethinking my strict ideology, I hope to figure out what technology will allow/encourage me to do what I most need/want to do, regardless of copyright status.
Here are some podcasts I’ve been listening to lately. If you know of any that I should be listening to, let me know. For those uninitiated into podcasts, I have some thoughts below the list.
This roundtable-style discussion with Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Tom Scheinfeldt and Mills Kelly is a good resource about tech for higher ed educators and researchers. Updated roughly monthly.
I have only recently discovered this podcast, and they won me over with a roundtable discussion of Blue Valentine. Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner talk about movies, music, television and all sorts of things once a week.
Nora Young does commentary on and conducts interviews about cutting edge technology.
I subscribe to these podcasts in iTunes (I dislike iTunes for a variety of reasons, but it’s the best solution for my needs), which downloads them automatically when they are available. I then transfer them to my iPhone and play them through my car radio as I drive endlessly around the Detroit suburbs. If it weren’t for the iPhone, I would probably use a different audio player, but the concept is the same. Subscribe via RSS in your audio player, et voila, they show up when the time is right. Here is Apple’s guide to finding and listening to podcasts.
photo credit kirk lau http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirklau/
The internet is off at home, due to nonpayment, but I keep instinctively trying to click on Tweetdeck or Firefox to look something up. It reminds me of how much I rely on the internet for information, for soothing escape from loneliness, to waste time. It’s lonely here in the morning without the internet. I am considering not turning it back on. I will miss streaming Netflix, but everything else I can do with my phone or at a local coffeeshop. Not having internet at home won’t kill me, and, who knows, it might make me a tad more productive. I’d probably get the house cleaned up, if nothing else.
I certainly have a love/hate relationship with the web. I’ll be the first to defend Twitter and Facebook, and have students email me rather than talk to them in class, and I love Youtube as a resource, and my blog and those of others have been great sources of connection, comfort and insight, but I will also waste an entire morning watching Funny or Die, or Jon Stewart videos, when I know I have other things to do and precious little time. I need to find a workable internet regime. Whether that means relegating it to certain times of day, or turning if off completely, or having to go to specific places to access it, I have to build a structure that mitigates my attention flitting tendencies. In fact, I’ve been going to the Hatcher Grad library at U of Michigan to do work precisely because I cannot access their internet.
I went on a meditation retreat a few years ago, where I did nothing but sit silently. No writing, no talking, nothing, and when I turned my phone on after a week and a half, and got back to the internet, I found that I had not really missed anything earth-shatteringly important. The world continued on, people still had breakfast, and T’d G it was F, and suffered loneliness, and shared links, and posted pics, and I was fine and they were fine without me. Point is, I don’t need to check Facebook 40 times a day, and neither do you.
We’ve all heard this before, from friends and colleagues, and severaltimes on thisblog. Moderation is the key, as it is in most everything in life, but it is so easy to lose sight of that, to get dragged back into the muck of everyone else’s everyday experience, to fear that you will miss something if you don’t keep checking. I feel like the end of The Social Network, where he is clicking and clicking, waiting for a response, except that instead of waiting for a particular response to a specific request from one desired individual, we are waiting for…what? I don’t know, but we keep getting pieces of it, tiny fragments that promise to show more, or to stand in for something we really do miss in our lives. To call it connection is to trivialize it, and risks setting up the tired old dichotomy of “real” (or f2f) connection and the “fake” connection of social networking sites like Facebook. No, online connections are very real, even if different, but, being asynchronous, they can usually wait.
I am one of those writers who worries a lot about writing. What do I want to write and why, how should I write, how do other people write, both in style and in their practice, what should I make my students write, and why?1
First of all, I need to invent a waterproof contraption that will let me write in the shower, which is where I get most of my ideas, only to lose them when I emerge.
The apparatus. Is it strange to think that a piece of software can loosen you up or encumber you? I have been writing on the beta version of Scrivener for Windows for almost a month, and I have written over 10,000 words in the last two weeks or so. I have outlined a book, and organized a suite of short stories. In Word, I stare at the screen, get bogged down in functionality. It is a strange experience. I’ve been playing with the idea of buying a typewriter, Paul Auster style, but that seems incredibly silly. I get it, though, the adherence to a particular device, or, in my case, software. I will definitely buy it when it comes out.
Pressing “Publish”. I have also been saving a lot of blog posts as drafts, never publishing them, either because the time seems to have passed, or they don’t yet seem just quite right, or because I fear they reveal too much about me as, you know, a human being. I am all paranoid about the job search situation, and I don’t want to alienate anyone by, like, having opinions and such. It’s very strange.
Reading. Been reading a lot of essays and short stories. Joy Williams keeps breaking my heart in small chunks. George Saunders blows me away in both his fiction and essays (the essay “Braindead Megaphone” is a great piece on current media practices). SimonVan Booy’s stories each contain a small universe.
Block? Thing is, I’m not stuck. I’m more like the Michael Douglas character in that movie I can never remember the title of (the movie is Wonder Boys. What can I never remember that?), where he doesn’t give anything to his editor because he can’t stop writing. Ok, I am not quite like that, but I am writing a lot, and I do not want to share it with you. Most of it. I’m also not smoking a bunch of weed, like he does in the movie. Just so you know.
My hope is that when I have enough raw material, I’ll be able to look back and carve something interesting out of it. Or several somethings. Writing is revision, it has been said. Speaking of which, I am revising portions of my diss for publication, and hoping to move on from there to something else, but I’ll be damned if I know what that is right now. I have been compiling research on the concept of “attention,” which I hope to write about as it intersects media studies, but it still has to take shape.
